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A new release for GNU Octave

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Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#51

Post by billfruit »

paijiut wrote: post #13
rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I use it often. Even after 20 years of using numeric/numarray/numpy, I still feel more productive in Octave and Matlab. Mostly time series analysis, signal processing, image analysis. Occasional modeling and simulation work. I think for me it’s that octave does it’s job well and doesn’t try to do other things. Python grates on me occasionally since it’s libraries seem to lack focus and try to be too much for too broa…

Matlab never feels a particularly elegant system to me, and most Matlab codebases I have seen are huge messes, with not much structuring and organization. In that respect I prefer python, that it naturally seems to lead to saner manner of organizing code, and also being very helpful in massaging/parsing/reformatting data into forms more amenable to processing.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#52

Post by Frost1x »

bayindirh wrote: post #28
rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

As a MATLAB license holder, I'm currently migrating some MATLAB code to be compatible with both. My license doesn't allow multiple computers, so MATLAB is living on my laptop. I'd rather run longer computations on my desktop system, which can handle these loads for a long period time without getting stressed thermally. My use case is to run ground-truth code designed by my professor and cross-check the results genera…

This is the main use case where I've used octave: working with someone of a group who has developed fairly involved Matlab codebase and we need to make it more scalable in some way, either for long running computation, reducing license costs, perform distributed memory work, or enable more robust parametric space exploration.

The Achilles heel here is that in Matlab, there's quite often a licensed toolbox dependency which makes portability more challenging. Every now and again I've seen pure Matlab code and the Octave transition is smooth. Sometimes there are so many toolbox dependencies that it just isn't even worth trying.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#53

Post by Der_Einzige »

kergonath wrote: post #10
rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I use Matlab-likes (actually Scilab rather than Octave) for one offs and interactive use. That’s usually playing with a dataset, test some analysis techniques, quick regressions, solving linear equations systems, this sort of things. I hate having to set up the whole machinery when doing this in Python. Also, the general-purpose nature of Python gets in the way, whereas the Matlab-like syntax is very focused and much…

Matplotlib is terrible (once you get to the point that you need to do non trivial things with it), that's why you use the excellent plotting library for python called "Bokeh"

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#54

Post by kergonath »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #53
kergonath wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Matlab-likes (actually Scilab rather than Octave) for one offs and interactive use. That’s usually playing with a dataset, test some analysis techniques, quick regressions, solving linear equations systems, this sort of things. I hate having to set up the whole machinery when doing this in Python. Also, the general-purpose nature of Python gets in the way, whereas the Matlab-like syntax is very focused and much…

Matplotlib is terrible (once you get to the point that you need to do non trivial things with it), that's why you use the excellent plotting library for python called "Bokeh"

Never really looked into it; I'll have a closer look. What do you think is its strengths?

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#55

Post by Der_Einzige »

kergonath wrote: post #54
Der_Einzige wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matplotlib is terrible (once you get to the point that you need to do non trivial things with it), that's why you use the excellent plotting library for python called "Bokeh"

Never really looked into it; I'll have a closer look. What do you think is its strengths?

For me? I care mainly about 2D and 3D scatter plots of large datasets. The GPU acceleration and automatic subsampling means that animated or interactive scatter plots of large amounts of data (for me it's language vectors) is super easy and fast rather than slow and crappy with matplotlib...

(I think matplotlib has an openGL backend that slightly improves but doesn't fix the issues with matplotlibs handling of large datasets)

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#56

Post by leephillips »

billfruit wrote: post #50
leephillips wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may have other reasons for preferring Matplotlib, but I don’t think anything allows more control over fine details or is more versitile than gnuplot.

GNU plot syntax somehow feels less discoverable, less intuitive, one constantly needs to be looking at the docs while doing it, was my experience.

I can’t really disagree. It takes a while to come to grips with its concepts and language for settings. But basic plotting is concise and intuitive.

I was mainly commenting on its configurability. Gnuplot lets you (once you figure out how) control everything; for example, the exact shape of the arrowheads in a vector plot.

(The name is “gnuplot”; it’s not a GNU project.)

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#57

Post by rightbyte »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I use Octave alot for engineering calculations. Writing simple global namespace scripts with "hardcoded" values.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#58

Post by bayindirh »

Frost1x wrote: post #52
bayindirh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a MATLAB license holder, I'm currently migrating some MATLAB code to be compatible with both. My license doesn't allow multiple computers, so MATLAB is living on my laptop. I'd rather run longer computations on my desktop system, which can handle these loads for a long period time without getting stressed thermally. My use case is to run ground-truth code designed by my professor and cross-check the results genera…

This is the main use case where I've used octave: working with someone of a group who has developed fairly involved Matlab codebase and we need to make it more scalable in some way, either for long running computation, reducing license costs, perform distributed memory work, or enable more robust parametric space exploration. The Achilles heel here is that in Matlab, there's quite often a licensed toolbox dependency…

The luck in my case is, since we're testing either algorithms for formulations, most (if not all) code is written in pure MATLAB and has no toolbox dependency.

However, we're living in a matrix world. MATLAB is slow and Octave is even slower while working with matrices. I have no idea how to fix that part.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#59

Post by tpoacher »

rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I did all my work and wrote my entire biomedical engineering (specifically medical image analysis) thesis on octave.

In the beginning I had started with matlab because my lab mostly used matlab functions. Obviously it's not that I couldn't finish my work on matlab, but I found octave nicer to use, better publication-quality graphs, very friendly open-source community, submitted bugs typically fixed within a couple of days (which was not the case when I submitted bugs in matlab, of which I had reported plenty, particularly when it came to misbehaving graphics), interesting outlooks from studying its source code, ability to keep or distribute my code in the absence of a prohibitive matlab licence, etc.

It is probably true that it is not necessarily as quick as matlab or julia these days, however there is a big red flag when one looks at "benchmarks" online, which is typically that these are used in such contrived ways that a proper octave user would probably not consider as good octave code. (I remember this was also true of julia's benchmarks against python for instance).

Octave in fact is very powerful. Not to mention that to the serious user, much of its power comes from its incredibly powerful interface to its vast library of open-source c++-implemented functions.

As for the why octave and not python (or any other X) question ... honestly, I don't know. E.g. why Linux and not Windows? Honestly, both are fine. But, without having an explicit list of arguments, I just find linux is more enjoyable and gets out of my way, whereas on windows I find myself having to do extra steps and double-check things at every turn. Well, somehow, I have the same vibe when working on octave vs python or julia. But that's not to say I don't enjoy those other languages too. To me it just feels Octave is just ... nicer and gets out of your way somehow. It's definitely my language of choice for quickly trying ideas out.

Re: A new release for GNU Octave

#60

Post by tpoacher »

enriquto wrote: post #12
rich_sasha wrote: post #2

I’m curious, are there any Octave users on HN? What are your use cases, in particular different to just an open-source Matlab-like clone? Why Octave not Python? I’m curious, not saying either option is bad.

I have always used Octave and never Matlab. The professor who introduced me to Octave some 15 years ago was quite the free software activist and did not even tell us that it was a clone. Today, I am a heavy user of Octave's linear algebra algorithms for large sparse matrices. I also use Python/numpy for other things, and sometimes for linear algebra too (due to the insistence of my coworkers), but it is much less ple…

I wouldn't call it a clone, anymore than I would call, say, Linux, a "clone" of Windows for needing to have a similar feature-set to appease newcomers. Much like linux vs windows, octave and matlab started life as completely different things, but octave being the 'underdog' and having a similar enough syntax necessarily tried to match matlab's syntax, to the extent that they pride on compatibility (and treat non-compatibility as 'bugs'), but extend the matlab language to include other features.

Now that both projects are mature, I think it's safe to say that matlab has 'borrowed' a lot of octave's nicer features over the years too (though obviously it's not something that can be publically admitted), like implicit broadcasting, command-line functions etc.

Obviously, neither matlab nor octave are strict subsets of each other. Also, I get the impression that matlab has started taking octave's compatibility very seriously in recent years, and has taken non-trivial steps to break it (annoying, but totally fair, in my view), which octave has resisted for the sake of backwards compatibility. Ironically this often makes octave a more reliable base for runnin older matlab scripts, than matlab itself. (e.g. in the same way that Wine is more reliable for running Win98 applications than Windows 10)

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